The Fifth Sunday, written by an (Asian?) author who calls himself Tom Broccoli, is a murder mystery with a lot of potentialities. The writing is concise and sober, but very evocative. The music and the sound effects are in line with the gloomy atmosphere. It offers an Agatha Christie Situation: Seven people who responded to an invitation on an Internet forum get stuck in a villa. There is a first murder, then a second and everyone is a suspect. With such a premise, we are ready for an exciting adventure.

But the game is flawed. There is no interaction and too many grammatical errors. The text needs to be read in blocks, in fifteen minutes you get to an ending, but to get to another one, you have to start over and read almost the same text, block after block. It’s all very tricky. To solve the game, you have to start from the beginning, choose the option, “I know who the killer is” and shoot your name. In short, it is impossible to finish the game at the first attempt. And all the other endings are blunt, obscure, they do not explain anything. The characters seem interesting, but they’re not fleshed out, there is no that psychological deepening that a mystery would require. The background color makes the text almost unreadable.

It is all so bizarre that I came to think that it was all sarcastic, as if the author wanted to joke around the mystery genre and fool the player.

But in all this, which may seem like a disaster, something shines … I have a feeling: the author has great talent. Who is hiding behind the name of Tom Broccoli?

“What?” is the question
you’re best to ask
if you don’t know where to start.
As in, “What the fuck?”
“What is this shit?”
and “What is my task?”
“What is this they ask of me?”
and “What am I to do?”
and “What is the way of being
that might manage to see me through?”

Here are the best lines of his story, a five-minute non-interactive read.

“What?” is the question
you’re best to ask
if you don’t know where to start.
As in, “What the fuck?”
“What is this shit?”
and “What is my task?”
“What is this they ask of me?”
and “What am I to do?”
and “What is the way of being
that might manage to see me through?”

Ay caramba, if it isn’t Salomé Vélez, “la diosa de la selva”! The vanished great ex-vedette of the Enjoyado Club, in her latest comeback as not-that-great third-line corista at the Casino del Ritmo! Some would say you’re a bit faded, but that’s just bitter ex-lovers. Or yourself, on a bad day.

Here’s an old-fashioned text adventure with parser. In Dancing With Fear we are Salomé Velez, a vedette in the Fifties that becomes a spy for the sake of revolution.

It takes place between the 1940s and 1960s in the Caribbean, colonized by Europeans, in an atmosphere mixing magic and anxiety for social tensions. The author, Victor Ojuel, a Spanish writer and game designer living in England, has screenwriting talents: the game is built into blocks of scenes, every time it is necessary to solve a situation to proceed. The story is interesting and the puzzles, rather simple (and old-fashioned), help to follow it well. It is clear that the author has been researching the history and his work is appreciable,

The writing is good, dialogues are well written, though sometimes they are a bit on-the-nose, verbose. Ojuel has the skills to improve them and make them more brilliant and terse. In some cases, to advance in the story, you have to talk to the same person several times in succession: just one was not enough?

On the other hand, it would have served some more details in the descriptions, which in some cases are too generic. Example:

LibraryThe walls are covered with bookcases and fine paintings. A magnificent pool table occupies the centre of the room, and there is a modern record player on a side table.

The description of Salomé, instead, is good (Ojuel describes the characters better rather than things and places)

Ay caramba, if it isn’t Salomé Vélez, “la diosa de la selva”! The vanished great ex-vedette of the Enjoyado Club, in her latest comeback as not-that-great third-line corista at the Casino del Ritmo! Some would say you’re a bit faded, but that’s just bitter ex-lovers. Or yourself, on a bad day.

The script, sometimes, has problems.

SPOILER
In the ballroom scene, after Claudio is arrested, it’s unlikely that nobody suspects Salomé, who came there with him. And then, why does the story require you to reach the car before looking for the safe? There is no good reason for that: from Salomé’s point of view, Claudio must have everything he needed to look for the safe, unless he’s a total fool, so she should not need anything to complete the mission (yet, the game says, “Let’s see if Claudio left something in the car for you”).
END SPOILER

Some programming flaws…

SPOILER
When the cellmate asks for the “secret signal”, it is very clear what we have to do, but it is difficult to tell it to the game. So, we smash against a very old-fashioned “guess-the-verb” situation.
If Salomé goes to her dressing room and returns to the table, no one realizes that she has another dress, no one makes a compliment, which is very unlikely.
END SPOILER

In the last years, text adventures became something else: they are no longer classic text adventures with room descriptions and parser. They are Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book games and stories with words to click to explore a world. In old style text adventures, the word “interactive” meant giving our character precise orders, with verbs and noun, and we had the illusion of governing him. Nowadays, “interactive” means, in some cases, choosing a road by clicking a word. That old illusion of being a dominus, a puppet master, is a little vanished. Yet, stories can be read / played more easily on mobile phones and potentially have a wider audience, extending to anyone who does not want or does not like to learn the rules of a parser.

This game, 10pm, goes a bit further. In a nutshell, it seemed to me a digital game of a puzzle magazine: the protagonist is a bird and we must learn its symbolic language and then place these symbols in boxes to communicate with the world. The idea is fascinating and gives a new meaning to the word “interactive”. But it is not for me. And the writing, inexplicably, has no apostrophes.

>x meYour most important feature, and the reason that you’re here, dear, is your mouth. All children are just mouths, of course, begging to be fed until they’re bigger. Nothing else need be said on that account, except perhaps that your mouth is already big for a child. It is your personality. Forget your other attributes. You ate them when you first arrived, which is why you were invited.

Chandler Groover is a prolific author who creates accurate and well-written interactive stories. He likes to find new angles: in Toby’s Nose, for example, we are Sherlock Holmes’ dog and the game is all built around a single action: sniffing. All you had to do was to sniff, you did not have to do anything else to get to the end.

Same happens in Eat Me: you just have to eat, any other action is useless. It is a fantasy game where the protagonist is a child who ends up in a castle where everything is edible. There is food anywhere but also objects, furniture and people can be eaten. The writing is fluid, the game is well programmed as always, and it’s fun to go around eating everything. Assuming that I don’t like grotesque stuff, this is a good proof of concept that it’s not for me. If I had a clear goal in mind from the start, I might have liked it more. Instead, after two hours I was a bit bored.

Ps. Of course, now all the stories I’m gonna review have to deal with the incredible emotions that Will Not Let Me Go gave me… and it will not be easy.

>x meYour most important feature, and the reason that you’re here, dear, is your mouth. All children are just mouths, of course, begging to be fed until they’re bigger. Nothing else need be said on that account, except perhaps that your mouth is already big for a child. It is your personality. Forget your other attributes. You ate them when you first arrived, which is why you were invited.

You can leave off reading the story and then come back to it laterThe story will remember where you wereRemember

Written by Stephen Granade, a veteran of interactive fiction, this story reminded me of Adam Cadre’s legendary Photopia: for the emotions it raises, the evocative writing, and the depth.

Stephen introduces his game with a single line and immediately explains everything (he doesn’t need twists): it’s the story of a man who gets Alzheimer’s disease just over sixty.

In the opening scene, we are at a funeral, and the author immediately introduces Fred in a moving way. Then, we go back and find Fred in recent stages of his life when he discovers he has the disease. He gradually realizes what’s happening, and we with him; he struggles to accept it, and we with him.

The way Stephen Granade used Twine is great: the words sometimes change because Fred struggles to remember, other words are cut … An extraordinary journey into memory, a wonderful work. If we really have to find a con, maybe some passages are too long, but Will Not Let Me Go is just short of a masterpiece. And that’s clear from the first lines…

You can leave off reading the story and then come back to it laterThe story will remember where you wereRemember

Final Girl is written with StoryNexus, a text-based-game creation toolbox, which has two interesting features: as in RPGs, it is based on cards (which can be places, people, objects) and updates the mood of the characters.

In Final Girl we are a girl who goes on vacation with friends at the shore of a lake, where they a meet a stalker/serial killer. A traditional horror movie theme (too much traditional) . The game opens with the stalker who wants to kill the girls and continues with an investigation to expose him.

Final Girl is well written. It’s clear that the author, Hanon Ondricek, it’s very skilled at evoking images and has a sense of rhythm and dialogues. His writing, in fact, is very “cinematic”. But the story didn’t thrill me and I found little exploited the StoryNexus’ features. And above all, I never had the feeling to make decisive choices .